Sunday, September 23, 2007

"Because I'm cheap..."

Both Spolsky and Graham can write, but my favorite geeky writer is Paul Ford:

"...Admitting that I lack real talent for it, I've turned computer science into a hobby, like weekend landscape watercolorists or dabblers in piano. I mostly like it because I'm cheap. Piano, calligraphy, swinging, macrame--those require trips to special stores, catalog orders, lessons. Computer science is only there inside the machine, waiting for you to sit down with a copy of some heavy book or eager tutorial (the Web has many pushers trying to hook you on a syntax) and start twiddling. It seems that the discipline is entirely about cheapness. The glory goes to parsimony, to the algorithms that invest the fewest CPU cycles for the greatest return..."